Early in Up from Slavery, Washington uses imagery to capture the agony of putting on a shirt made of flax—the only shirt he was allowed to wear while enslaved:
I can scarcely imagine any torture, except, perhaps, the pulling of a tooth, that is equal to that caused by putting on a new flax shirt for the first time. It is almost equal to the feeling that one would experience if he had a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh. Even to this day I can recall accurately the tortures that I underwent when putting on one of these garments. The fact that my flesh was soft and tender added to the pain. But I had no choice.
The imagery here captures the pain of Washington’s experience with the shirt, as he compares wearing it to “the pulling of a tooth” and having “a dozen or more chesnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points, in contact with his flesh.” This language encourages readers to truly feel the pain alongside him. His descriptions are not merely sensory, but they are also in a language that his readers can understand (as it’s unlikely that they have experience with flax shirts firsthand).
Moment like this are also examples of ethos as they establish for readers Washington’s authority—as a Black man who went from experiencing the horrifying realities of slavery to becoming a successful educator and public intellectual, Washington proves his own point that hard work guarantees success. This moment highlights the truth in Washington’s theory on meritocracy—if he was able to survive the tortures of slavery and become an accomplished educator and writer, then anyone can (if, like him, they work hard enough).
In a subtle example of ethos, Washington attempts to persuade Black readers to trust him by describing moments of racial discrimination in his life, such as the following:
Without asking as to whether I had any money, the [hotel-keeper] firmly refused to even consider the matter of providing me with food or lodging. This was my first experience in finding out what the colour of my skin meant. In some way I managed to keep warm by walking about, and so got through the night. My whole soul was so bent upon reaching Hampton that I did not have time to cherish any bitterness toward the hotel-keeper.
Ethos, as a persuasive writing device, establishes a writer’s expertise and authority on a given subject. Here Washington is proving to readers that he can speak on the subject of racism because he knows what it’s like to be affected by it. In other words, he is an expert on racism because he has lived it—he has learned first-hand “what the colour of [his] skin meant” by being refused food and lodging simply because he was Black.
Moments like this are especially important for Washington to include in his narrative because many Black public intellectuals at the time (such as W.E.B. Dubois) publicly criticized Washington for downplaying the realities of racism, claiming that he was not adequately representing how much oppression they regularly faced.
